AMD Radeon HD 4770 On Linux

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 512MB graphics card arrived in an appropriately sized cardboard package. On the exterior this Sapphire packaging advertised the various features of this product, like a 40nm manufacturing process, GDDR5 memory, HDMI support, game physics, and ATI CrossFire X.

Included with the PCI Express 2.0 graphics card was a DVI to VGA adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter, one ATI CrossFire bridge, a 4-pin molex to 6-pin PCI-E power adapter, video output adapter, Sapphire driver installation CD, and a Sapphire graphics card user manual. As bonuses for Windows users, Sapphire also included copies of CyberLink DVD Suite and CyberLink PowerDVD. No drivers or software for Linux users are included any of these CD/DVDs. Below is the Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 graphics card compared to a Radeon HD 4670 and Radeon HD 4830, both of which are other Sapphire products.

While Windows users have these HD4770-supportive Catalyst drivers included with the product, Linux users will need to wait a few days. Catalyst 9.4 is the latest Linux driver available through AMD's web-site, while Catalyst 9.5 will be introduced later this month. The Radeon HD 4770 PCI ID (0x94B3) can be found in the Catalyst 9.4 release, but it will result in an "unsupported hardware" watermark appearing on the screen and there may be a few other rough spots in this early hardware support. This is similar to what we experienced with the Radeon HD 4890 when using Catalyst 9.3. With the introduction of Catalyst 9.5, however, there will be official support for the HD 4770 on both Linux and Windows. For our testing we were using a Catalyst 9.5 Linux press driver and we will have more details on that driver later in this article.